WASHINGTON, DC - Over the past few years, much has been discussed about the newest generation of Americans. Typically, Millennials have been defined as those who were born after the mid-1980s. A recent discovery has put that date into question as historians have found evidence that Millennials have secretly been living in the United States since as early as the 1700s.

“It’s well known that each generation is unique, with zero overlap between them. And, that their members share 100% of the same personality traits and philosophies,” said Wendell Peebles, a historian at Georgetown University. When asked how a Millennial could have been born hundreds of years before the generation came into existence he noted something about “looking and sounding like a duck.”

Millennials have frequently been categorized as unemployable, entitled, and unlikely to become productive members of society. With this new discovery, we have a much deeper pool of data to prove the veracity of those claims. One of the earliest known Millennials is Benjamin Franklin—who like all Millennials felt entitled to quick promotions and was never content with a nine to five job. “He hated making candles at his father’s shop and quit that job to be an apprentice printmaker which he also quit—before becoming a bookkeeper, shopkeeper, and currency cutter. Classic Millennial job-hopping. I’m surprised he didn’t have an Etsy store” said Peebles.

He’s not the only historic figure to be secretly a Millennial. It’s become quite evident that Ralph Waldo Emerson and pretty much all of the Transcendentalists were really secret Millennials. Noted Henry David Thoreau scholar, Mitchell Kale, believes that “we really should have seen this sooner.” He continued by saying “I mean, they had money but decided to rough it in nature. The only thing that would scream ‘Millennial’ more would be if they stayed in their parents’ basements.”

This discovery has rocked historical social circles, and put many of our demographic segmenting techniques into question. The community is beginning to wonder whether or not grouping millions of people together under umbrellas of sweeping generalizations is somehow an ineffective way of doing things.

Kale mumbled “I used to think Nikola Tesla, Muhammad Ali, and Maya Angelou, were some our nation’s best. Now that I know they’re Millennials, I can see now that they’ve just been lazy, entitled brats all along.”